Abigail Adams (November 22, 1744 - October 28, 1818) was an American writer, correspondent, and political advisor best known as the wife of John Adams, the second President of the United States, and the mother of John Quincy Adams, the sixth. She is among the most documented women of the Founding era, owing to an extensive surviving correspondence - particularly with her husband - that spans decades of American political life. Historians draw on her letters as primary sources for understanding domestic life, political culture, and women's experience in late 18th- and early 19th-century America.
Born Abigail Smith in Weymouth, Massachusetts, she was largely self-educated, as formal schooling for women was uncommon in colonial New England. She married John Adams in 1764 and managed the family household and finances through long periods of his absence during the Revolutionary War and his diplomatic postings in Europe. Her letters to John Adams during these years are among the most frequently cited documents in the study of the American Founding, including her oft-quoted 1776 request that the Continental Congress “remember the ladies” in forming new laws - a passage that has been interpreted variously as proto-feminist advocacy, rhetorical persuasion, or conventional spousal counsel. See Remember the Ladies - Debate.
She accompanied John Adams to Europe during his diplomatic years (1784-1788), living in France and England, and later resided in Philadelphia and Washington as First Lady (1797-1801). She was the first First Lady to occupy the White House, though only briefly, as the Adams administration ended in March 1801. After John Adams's presidency, the couple retired to Quincy, Massachusetts, where Abigail Adams died in 1818 of typhoid fever.
Adams's correspondence constitutes one of the richest documentary records left by any American woman of her era. Scholars use her letters to examine topics including colonial and early republican domestic economy, attitudes toward slavery (she expressed opposition to the institution while living in a society that practiced it), the experience of political wives, and the boundaries of women's participation in political discourse during the Founding period. She has also been studied in the context of Republican Motherhood, the civic ideology that assigned women the role of cultivating virtuous citizens within the domestic sphere.
Her relationship with John Adams was a close intellectual partnership, though the structural inequalities of 18th-century marriage meant her influence was exercised through private correspondence and counsel rather than public office. The extent and nature of her political influence on her husband remains a subject of historical interpretation. See Abigail Adams Political Influence - Debate.